National Post (National Edition)
How Black entrepreneurs are handling the challenges posed by pandemic.
HOW BLACK BUSINESSES ARE HANDLING THE CHALLENGES POSED BY THE PANDEMIC
BANKS, THEY CARED ABOUT YOUR CREDIT. INVESTORS, THE ONLY COLOUR THEY CARED ABOUT IS GREEN, LIKE HOW IS YOUR BUSINESS DOING. I'M AN OPTIMISTIC PERSON SO UNLESS SOMETHING WAS BLATANT IN MY FACE I PROBABLY WOULDN'T SEE IT. — ISMAIL ATTITALLA
First it was the dazzling colour. Always the vibrant hues of sun, earth and sky in her native Ghana displayed in traditional dress for special occasions. Then it was the sewing machine from her mother to make the look hip in modern Canada. Now it's six-figure revenue boosted by celebrities, such as Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay, sporting the colours. Always the African colours.
Entrepreneur Catherine Addai built up her clothing business — Kaela Kay, named after one of her daughters — in her Mississauga, Ont., home with $1,500 in seed money from her chemical engineer husband, Nick. Along the way, she says she encountered cultural resistance to her designs, even amid the surge in awareness brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement.
“A lot of the pushback I got was ` African prints: It's too bright, too bold, we wouldn't know where to put you in our store, we don't know if the customers would like it,'” Addai said recently by phone. “So it's been me just trying over the last few years to encourage them it's not a Black or white thing. It's just prints.”
Now the pandemic has thrown her another curve. Like many business owners, she's seen revenue plunge — business has fallen by half in her Toronto store and more than 30 per cent online. For Black entrepreneurs, the challenge has in some ways been greater.
Visible minorities have been hardest hit by the joblessness caused by the pandemic. Nearly 40 per cent of the country's Black community believes COVID-19 has had a moderate to major impact on their ability to pay bills, according to government figures published this month. That's second only to South Asians at 44 per cent, Statistics Canada said. The economic struggles are also resulting in rising rates of mental health issues among minorities.
The pandemic forced Addai to cancel pop-up stores launching her spring collection in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Toronto, but the Black Lives Matter protests helped spur business.
“It brought a lot more visibility, more eyes to my company, a lot of people putting me on, people sharing, `Support your local Black designer,'” she said. “Through those calls to action, a lot of non-Blacks supported Black businesses so we can stay afloat.... I hope this whole thing is not just a moment in time, but something that we continue going forward.”
Addai is staying positive, emboldened in part by a pivot to mask-making. She's also expanding to a boutique in Ottawa and another retailer in Vancouver.
Retail has performed better than some sectors, powered by government handouts that boosted disposable income. On the losing end are entrepreneurs in tourism and hospitality.
Entrepreneur Ismail Attitalla in Edmonton has cycled through concepts in storage rentals, taxis, brewery tours and airline flight crew shuttle services before focusing on developing the last two.
“My main business became Plan B and my other businesses that were my Plan B became Plan A,” Attitalla said by phone. “During the pandemic two of those completely stopped, though the flight crew service (Aircrew Express) is still going because it's an essential service, although it's 90 per cent down.”
Attitalla, a native of Sudan who has also lived in Saudi Arabia, Connecticut and Montreal, secured a mentor from non-profit small-business booster Futurpreneur to help him with technology behind his rental storage initiative, Stashii. “It did a lot for my confidence just because when you're a solo founder, first time, having someone you can talk to and bounce ideas off of, it really helps.”
Though the pandemic has forced Stashii to the sidelines for now, a $40,000 federal emergency business loan is helping Attitalla develop his Alberta Craft Tours into a booking platform for breweries called Hoppy Pass. It's due to launch Nov. 3, by coincidence the same day as the U.S. election, which may drive people to drink.
“I've partnered up with a beer festival company that's entrenched with a lot more breweries than we were as a brewery tour company, for them to sell it and implement it,” he said. “The blessing in disguise with COVID is that it accelerates ingenuity in other things that you normally would not have time to see.”
Attitalla said the pandemic has accentuated certain challenges, but racism hasn't been a factor. “Banks, they cared about your credit. Investors, the only colour they cared about is green, like how is your business doing,” Attitalla said. “I'm an optimistic person so unless something was blatant in my face I probably wouldn't see it.”
Another impact of the pandemic is how travel restrictions imposed by governments forced people to consider local alternatives to foreign holidays. As cottages and Airbnbs filled up, many considered camping. But what about the gear? In stepped entrepreneur David Tall of Montreal, who runs a camping gear rental service.
“This summer was crazy,” Tall said by phone. “I'm expecting this winter also to be really busy in January, February and March for winter camping because a lot of people want to try it since they probably can't go anywhere internationally.”
Tall, who was born in France to parents from Mali and Quebec, began his company, Locapaq, in 2018, after years of friends badgering to borrow his own equipment made him realize there was a market to be tapped. He concentrates on renting mid- to high-quality gear so people are less likely to suffer a bad experience and be discouraged from camping altogether. His first bricks-andmortar store is set to open next month in Montreal's Rosemount.
The business owner, who's starting a crowdfunding campaign to increase inventory, says he's encountered systemic racism in the past with police, but never anything to do with Locapaq, whether in banking, customers or the community. In fact, he feels that recently he's seen the opposite.
“Maybe it's a media push, but if there are two similar projects, one white, one Black, people are going to go towards the Black one to say `You know what? We're going to give them a better chance to explain themselves and the project.'”
That hasn't been the case with Lola Adeyemi, a Lagos, Nigeria, native who says her It's Souper online portal of pepper and curry-flavoured soups is a tough sell when its promotional kiosks at supermarkets are staffed by Blacks as opposed to whites — or when encouraging receptions by email sour on meeting store managers in person.
“When I get to the store it's a totally different experience. Sometimes I ask myself, `Is it because I'm Black? Am I predisposed to feel that way? Or is that really why it is?'” Adeyemi said. “When it comes to systemic racism you can't really touch it. It's something you feel.”
She said other barriers include a “cumbersome” small-business aid structure, where sometimes you have to prove $200,000 in revenue just to access $10,000. Still, she is hopping hurdles with a $72,000 grant (plus the same amount in pro bono fees) from Toronto law firm Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP this month as part of its first Black-owned small business award, adoption by Sobeys grocery chain in Ontario locations before a potential national rollout and a pending deal with an upmarket chain, she said.
Also tapping Sobeys in the food market is Sonel Merjuste of Montreal and his Merjex line of tempeh, a typically Indonesian fermented soybean product that he's marinated with a native Haitian touch and made into burgers and other items.
“We were on the verge of picking up speed when the COVID hit,” he said. “At first we wanted to be more in the institutional market like restaurants, hotels and hospitals. That's where we thought we'd get our biggest margins. But with COVID-19 this whole segment has disappeared. So we had to turn right away to supplying grocery stores (which is very competitive).”
An immigrant who fled Haiti's political instability in 2008, Merjuste said his main business challenge starting the company last year was raising capital because he lacked collateral, made more difficult when a Quebec grant authority official tried to block his application at every turn.
“It was just because we were Black,” Merjuste said by phone. “He was looking for every little thing in our documents. He was searching for things saying, `No, what is this? Not that.' It was like somebody that says `Over my dead body, you will not get it.' Finally we got it when he was sick six months later and we tried again.”
While he says his experiences at university in Florida and having a 17-year-old son who drives make him ever conscious of potential systemic racism with police, that incident with the provincial authority is the sole overt case of racism he's experienced in this country.
“Canada, is for me — who knows a little bit about the U.S. — we're in a pretty much nice place to be.”